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by evil-olive 332 days ago
> if this was built by OP or vibe-coded

I hope we start to see some etiquette / conventions developed around this, especially for open source projects.

if I showed up to a dinner party with homemade cookies, my friends would be appreciative.

if I showed up with store-bought cookies, my friends would probably still be appreciative.

but if I showed up with store-bought cookies and tried to claim they were homemade, my friends would probably feel insulted. even if the cookies were amazing, they'd be overshadowed by my dishonesty about them.

the problem, of course, is that if we had some standard section in a readme for expressing the spectrum between "0% LLM output, entirely whittled by hand as a labor of love" vs "100% LLM output, human eyes have never actually looked at any of it" we'd have LLMs hallucinate that readme section, saying they were human-coded.

3 comments

Then the more serious one of "do these cookies contain allergen X?"

Any of the answers "yes, no, I don't know" is OK, although the latter is irritating, but if you claim "no" when the allergen actually is present it's a disaster. Whether that's because you bought them and didn't look at the ingredients or made them yourself in a careless shared environment.

For code from the Internet there's the related question "how likely is this to contain security holes or data-loss bugs?" And being LLM-written currently makes that a lot more likely.

Likewise, if I show up with homemade cookies, after your friend asks "who are you and why are you in my house," if they then assume my cookies must be store bought and I probably wouldn't be able to have made them myself, I'd think them rather judgmental.
Will not argue, pro or against, everyone is entitled to their own opinion. But this reminds me of the early 2000 interviews when every one was asking if you used Google search, and now we use "google it" as a verb.

There was a meme at one point with a dude at an interview answering that with something like this: If you google a recipe, it doesn't mean the food is done, you still need someone to cook it.

As for the "xx% LLM" or not, I would argue the same for "xx% Googled", "xx% Stackoverflow" "xx% Learned in school vs copied from the interned", "xx% actual development and engineering vs library importing and glueing".